Page 6 of Do Not Awaken Love (The Moroccan Empire #3)

They took away my veil.

T hroughout that night our progress is marked only by the occasional splash of oars, mostly by the billowing sound of the sail above us.

The men do not talk much between themselves.

The rise and fall of the sea makes me sick to my stomach and I hear Catalina retching over and over again, smell the bitter bile of her vomit, which in turn has me gagging until my stomach voids again.

I taste, amidst the bitterness, the last sweet hint of apple and think of Eve’s mouth, whether she could still taste the sweetness of the forbidden fruit on her tongue even as she stumbled out of the Garden of Eden.

Perhaps she could. It would have been a bitter reproach, for all its sweetness.

At some time in the night, exhausted from all that has gone before, I begin to doze.

I am awoken by a splash and the shouts of the men.

There is a lot of noise and a torch is lit, but I cannot see much beyond the vomit-spattered deck.

But shortly afterwards I am lifted up and carried over a man’s shoulder as though I were a sack of grain, to a different part of the ship.

I feel my bonds first loosened and then fastened to something.

I seem to be tied to a heavy weight of some kind.

I feel Catalina placed close by me, but I am so tired that the ensuing darkness calls to me again and I fall asleep not long after.

The half-light of early dawn wakes me. At last, I can see.

I look about me, see Catalina asleep at my feet, her long ropes bound to a metal ring set into the deck, as are mine.

Above us is a small awning of heavy red silk, pulled low over us like a tiny shelter, so that I can hardly see out of the sides.

But Sister Maria is not with us.

Panicked, I try to stand but cannot, for the rope is not long enough. Instead, I kneel and try to scan the boat deck, wriggling to the edge of the awning and poking my head out. The light dazzles me.

I can see a few men on the deck. Two stand by the prow, one by the mast, a handful lie wrapped in rough blankets, sleeping.

The oars are stacked by the sides, waiting for use.

The ship rises and falls with the waves, but the motion is calmer than I feared.

From low down, I cannot see a shoreline. There is no sign of Sister Maria.

“Sister Maria!” I call out.

The men at the prow turn to look at me and then look back at the sea, uninterested. I can hear them talking to one another, there is a brief laugh, then silence.

“Sister Maria!” I call more loudly, my voice higher than I would like, wavering.

Catalina’s eyes open suddenly, she jerks awake and struggles briefly against her bonds as though having forgotten what happened, before recalling where she is and what has gone before now.

Seeing me, she begins to cry. “Sister Juliana,” she gulps, “what will become of us? Will the convent send men to bring us home?”

Poor innocent. She has little knowledge of the world.

No doubt she has heard heroic stories of knights rescuing their ladies, of noble men setting the world to rights.

She does not know, has not thought, as I have done, that the convent may never even hear word of our whereabouts.

Alberte’s body may not be found, our horses may be sold to some disreputable dealer, our Mother Superior may believe that we have run away, or she may guess that bandits or Norsemen have robbed, raped, killed or kidnapped us, but certainly there is nothing she can do about it.

The Norsemen have taken us onto the high seas without a soul seeing us and I am certain their destination is either their own homelands far to the north, or the Maghreb, to the south.

I squint at the rising sun in the east. It is on my left. We are sailing south.

“Catalina,” I say.

She continues to sob but looks up at me.

“It is likely that we are sailing to the south of Al-Andalus, most likely to the Maghreb,” I tell her. “We are to be sold as slaves to the Muslims.”

She lets out a little cry and one of the men turns. Seeing us still bound, he looks away again.

“Catalina, if it is Al-Andalus and we are separated, then if you can ever run away, head north, back to Galicia.”

“And the Maghreb?” she asks.

I have no answer. Already what I have suggested to her is absurd, that a thirteen-year-old girl might escape her captors and travel safely from Al-Andalus to Galicia, but it is all the hope I can offer her.

I wanted to give her something to cling to.

But from the Maghreb? Who knows where we might be sold to?

How would we escape and travel over the sea even to reach Al-Andalus?

“You must pray,” I tell her at last. I do not know what else to tell her.

“For rescue?” she asks.

How can I tell her she will not be rescued? How can I tell her, looking at her long black hair and fine features, her large black eyes now rimmed red with tears, that she is a beautiful young girl, that she is likely to be sold to a rich man as a bedfellow, a whore?

“You must pray to the Virgin Mary for her guidance and protection,” I say at last.

Catalina begins to mumble. “Hail Mary, Full of Grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women…”

I look about me, still fearful for Sister Maria.

Where has she been taken? Has she been hurt, or taken by one of the men to…

to…? I hardly dare think what I fear. But the deck is mostly uncovered, surely she should be visible to me.

I twist my head this way and that and finally I open my mouth and scream her name as loud as I can.

“Sister Maria!” I only want to hear her answer me once, if she can, just to know that she is here, with us.

I open my mouth to scream again and am cuffed sharply round the head. A Norseman has come close to us and he is scowling.

“Silentium,” he says in oddly accented Latin, silence .

“Please,” I say, kneeling up, staring up into his strange blue eyes, replying in Latin, hopeful that we can speak together. “Please. Where is Sister Maria?”

He stares at me. I had thought perhaps he spoke Latin well, but it appears he does not.

I point at Catalina, at myself, at an invisible Sister Maria. “Where?”

He makes a gesture at the green-blue waves. “Transulto.” Then he walks away, joining the men by the prow.

I stare at the man and then at the sea. I think through what I said, the exact words, the exact gestures I made for him to understand me.

I think of his answer, leapt , of the gesture, the exact direction to which he indicated.

I think through our brief exchange over and over again trying to find a different possible explanation.

There is none.

Sister Maria, in the night, jumped overboard and drowned.

That was the cause of the splash and shouts I heard in the night and the reason why Catalina and I were lifted to the middle of the ship and bound to the deck, so that we could not do the same.

Fat little Sister Maria, too much in love with the outside world for my liking, who wished she might have had children of her own, who spoke cheerfully and too long with everyone she met, who ate greedily of nature’s bounty, chose to die rather than face what might come and in so doing, has committed a mortal sin.

Catalina has not understood the conversation I had with the Norseman.

She is still quietly sobbing and repeating Hail Marys; she has not reacted to the news.

Perhaps she thinks Sister Maria is tied up somewhere behind us, perhaps she thinks she has been taken elsewhere on the ship.

I sit in silence as the sun rises in the sky and listen to Catalina’s whispered prayers.

I do not speak again until night falls. In the darkness, after repeated questions, I have to tell Catalina what has become of Sister Maria, then listen to her weeping for the rest of the night.

I lose track of time, but the ship rises and falls on the water for one day after another, perhaps seven in all, perhaps ten, I cannot be sure.

We are kept under the little shelter, the height of it meaning we cannot stand, only lie or sit.

They change our bonds, so that we are tied around the waist with our hands free, this so that we can use a pail to relieve ourselves.

The Norsemen care enough for us as cargo that they give us water and a little food during the voyage, enough to keep us alive but not enough to stop our endless thirst, our endless hunger.

At night we have our hands bound again, they are not willing to risk the loss of another valuable commodity.

We see daylight and darkness come and go but rarely see anything beyond our tiny red shelter: not the sea, nor the ship, nor the men, except for one or two who empty our pail of waste or throw food into our laps.

But there comes a day when we make land, I can hear the men shout and I prepare myself to know to what shore we have come.

Our little awning is suddenly unfastened, rolled up and put away. Catalina and I shrink back, newly made afraid of the outside world, knowing our destiny is about to take on an as yet unknown shape.